


Learn to Be Still

by roaroftheninth, totallynotme



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 14:44:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roaroftheninth/pseuds/roaroftheninth, https://archiveofourown.org/users/totallynotme/pseuds/totallynotme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What can I do?” Zayn doesn’t mean to sound so helpless, but he needs to know how not to let this ruin everything.</p><p>And Louis – one thing Louis knows is how to do this. Because he's been where Zayn is and made every mistake you can, and none of it has made it any easier on him and Harry.</p><p>"Trust me when I say it, love,” Louis says quietly. “When they tell you to pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, fucking smile - do it."</p><p>Or: Zayn is pretty new to this whole hide-your-relationship thing, but Louis isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learn to Be Still

The session isn’t going well. Zayn’s been doing the same run for nearly an hour, over and over, and however unhappy the sound techies are with him, it’s nothing compared to how irritated he is with himself. He’s lost count of how many takes he’s blown by the time there’s a knock on the glass and it’s pretty much universally decided that it’s time for a coffee break.

 

(This isn’t a smoke break, his vocal coach doesn’t say. This is a get-your-shit-together break.)

 

(She doesn’t have to say it because the way she looks is the way Zayn feels; a little puzzled, and a lot annoyed.)

 

The last few weeks have been rough, admittedly. Zayn doesn’t sleep or eat well when he’s under a lot of pressure, and lately the strain has been unbelievable. He’s worn out, and he’s never been that good of an actor. It’s a serious effort sometimes to get up in the morning and put on his game face; to emerge from his room as  _Zayn Malik of One Direction_ , with all of the requisite swagger and inscrutability that seems to entail nowadays (Zayn really doesn’t know how it got this far) _._

 

He reaches a point sometimes where he really has no fucking idea where  _Zayn Malik of One Direction_ ends and he properly starts; where the guy the mainstream media thinks would get a tattoo of Perrie’s face on his arm ends and the kid – honestly, the  _kid_  who wants to curl up in Liam’s Batman shirt and sleep away the afternoon, begins.

 

He knows he doesn’t get to complain, objectively. Sure, he doesn’t get to see his family as much as he’d like, and he’s the kind of guy who prefers a level of privacy you just don’t get as one-fifth of the biggest pop phenomenon on the planet, but objectively, the fact that his entire persona is a prison doesn’t register for most people as something that could legitimately be worth getting worked up about.

 

 _Sure, you don’t get to be who you want, but you’re_ famous.

 

It’s a funny kind of tradeoff, because what does ‘adored by millions’ mean when the person they adore isn’t you?

 

Zayn’s not an idiot. He knows how this works, this people-as-commodities business. He knows he got pigeon-holed into the ‘bad boy’ role early, because of the cigarettes and the tattoos and, yeah, there’s a subtext of race there too. He’s not an  _idiot._

 

But all of this seemed kind of reasonable - or, at least, a fair trade - until the point where Danielle ended things with Liam. And Zayn – Zayn realized that hiding who you are is a lot easier than hiding who you love, because he didn’t appreciate it until he came into the tour bus after getting about twenty-five texts from Harry about the breakup (and Louis had said, quietly,  _he’s in the back_  in the way that meant  _where the fuck have_ you _been, he only wants you_ ) that yeah, it’s Liam – it’s always been Liam.

 

(No matter how many rules it breaks. This is not the kind of thing you can govern with  _not allowed_  and contractual image clauses.)

__

The thing is, Zayn knows Liam better than anyone else does, knows those feelings of inadequacy that never go away, knows how it  _feels_  when one nasty thing happens to you and suddenly you’re fourteen again, curled up on your bed after the first day of school, telling that empty feeling inside yourself that you don’t care, don’t care,  _don’t care_  that this year won’t be any different than the last.  _Don't need friends, don't need friends, don't need friends._  You’d rather sit at home and read comics anyway. Don't need friends for that.

 

He knows how it is when that kid resurfaces every time you’re feeling down, to take one bad feeling and magnify it into,  _even then everyone knew there was nothing worth liking._  So when the breakup happens and Liam’s got a fistful of the front of Zayn’s t-shirt like he thinks he’ll absolutely die if Zayn leaves him now, Zayn fucking  _hurts_  for him. He needs Liam not to feel like that again, not to need someone like Danielle to tell him that she didn’t break up with him because he’s  _inadequate_ , somehow.

 

Liam’s not fucking inadequate and Zayn realizes suddenly that he wants to keep telling him that he loves him until he believes it.

 

Of course, they get about ten seconds to themselves before it appears on Management’s radar, and gradually, there are subtle schedule changes, rearrangements in the way they’re set up during interviews – even questions that direct them away from talking about each other. The two of them don’t notice at first, or maybe they try not to.

 

Zayn’s gotten pretty good at wearing the face of the ‘Bradford bad boy’ by now (even though that moniker makes him want to crawl behind a bush and die) but he’s less practiced at pretending he gives less of a shit about someone than he actually does. And really, it pisses him off on a level he hadn’t anticipated, because while faking a persona in order to sell a few records feels stifling sometimes, makes him question who he is, it doesn’t threaten anything he’s legitimately afraid of losing.

 

Having to hide the way he feels about Liam is more frightening, because he doesn’t know what will happen if he starts to question  _that._

 

And, fuck, Liam says it one day, what they’re both thinking while they’re carefully not touching outside of a venue while Zayn smokes.

 

"I don't want to end up like Lou," he says, and, yeah, Zayn knows, because they've all seen it; the way Louis will keep struggling even if it hurts him, like an animal caught in a trap. The way Harry lights him up from the inside but Louis is so bitter over having to hide it that his eyes shine too bright and he says awful things he doesn't mean. The way they don’t touch each other so much anymore, even when no one’s watching, because they’re so used to being separated, and while Harry takes it in stride because that’s who he is, Louis lets it wreck him.

 

So it’s funny, honestly, that while all of this is going on, Zayn’s expected to show up in the studio and sing until his lungs give out. It’s funny that no one makes an educated guess about why he can’t pull himself together and nail the kind of vocal work he’s done a hundred times. It makes Zayn shoot his vocal coach a look as he bangs out of the sound booth, and it’s not like she deserves it – it’s not her sitting around dictating what he can and can’t be seen doing – but it kind of makes him feel better.

 

It does surprise him, though, when he pushes out into the hallway and Louis’ there, leaning against the wall, waiting for him. Zayn can’t even dredge up a smile, and Louis doesn’t seem to expect one; he catches Zayn by the elbow and says, “Walk with me”, leading him toward the deserted, gated parking lot at the back of the studio.

 

Once they're outside and alone, Zayn breaks away from him, because whatever he needs to talk about, Zayn needs to get this out of his system first. He kicks the brick wall of the building angrily, pushing himself away from it. Louis just watches him.

 

Zayn wants to say a hundred million things. "I'm falling apart,” is the best summary he can make.

 

"I know." Louis shoves his hands into the pockets of his trackies and leans easily against the wall, surveying the parking lot from under a purple beanie that might be Harry's. "Been there, mate."

 

Sometimes it's easy to forget that under the boldness and humour and protectiveness over his bandmates, Louis carries a fucking hurricane under his skin that mainly doesn't hurt people because Harry - fuck, just by existing, Harry holds it back. Everyone who doesn't know them well thinks that Louis is the strong one, but if you asked him about it, he'd say he's the one with his shit the least together.

 

“What can I do?” Zayn doesn’t mean to sound so helpless, but he needs to know how not to let this ruin everything.

 

And Louis – one thing Louis knows is how to do this. Because he's been where Zayn is and made every mistake you can, and none of it has made it any easier on him and Harry.

 

"Trust me when I say it, love,” Louis says quietly. “When they tell you to pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, fucking smile - do it."

 

Louis wouldn't have anticipated, a year ago, that he'd be the one giving out that particular piece of advice. But he's battle-weary now and he understands that there's no victory; there's only tiring yourself out.

 

"Every time I let myself lose it, it never makes anything better. It just makes me tired, and it makes sure that Harry's got to pick up the pieces again. That's not fair. He's got just as much right to rage as me, only he holds it together because one of us has to. And if I could,  _I'd_  do it for  _him_. But I can't. All I can do is concentrate on him, on making him happy, and on not making him have to fucking carry me."

 

It’s probably easiest, Zayn thinks, that they’re not looking at each other; that Louis has his back to the wall and Zayn’s angled away, listening but not watching everything that lives on Louis’ face, no matter how much he gets paid to bury it.

 

"I know he's better than me,” Louis adds, after a beat. “I also know he'll never see it that way, mostly because he's a fucking idiot. But I love that fucking idiot and I can't put him through me falling apart. And you've got an idiot of your own."

 

Zayn experienced it once, when Louis lost it. There wasn't anyone else there to witness it, and it stayed out of the papers. But Zayn held him and all he could do was rock him gently, because Louis came apart at the seams when Harry wasn't there to stop it.

 

It’s not even the fury that’s frightening; it’s what comes after, when there’s nowhere left to go but down.

 

"How did this even happen? I'm nineteen, how am I even supposed to..." Zayn simply doesn't  - understand how this happened. Or why. Or how he can even feel this strongly about a person in a way that makes him question  _everything_. "If someone had told me this was going to happen, two years ago, I'd have laughed in their faces."

 

"We’re young and stupid and hormonal, mate,” Louis says, and he probably means it lightly but his tone doesn’t quite get there. “Nothing we can do about that. Look at it this way – thinking about him gives you something to focus on. Think about how much of a waste it'd be to fall apart on him because he'd be so upset on your behalf and it'd waste whatever time you did have together. Think about the fact that every time you lose it on management, he pays the price with you."

 

Louis hunches almost imperceptibly. "Because I wish I'd thought of all that a long time ago. Harry's had a lot of grief because of me."

 

Zayn turns to look at him, then, and Louis’ eyes are hard and glittering, more slate than grey in the light of an overcast afternoon.

 

“I’m - Lou, I'm sorry,” Zayn says, not even sure what he’s apologizing for.

 

Louis laughs without colour. “Because you let this happen to me?”

 

Zayn hesitates a moment. “We all did – ”

 

“Don’t do that,” Louis says, cutting him off. “I did this to me.” The smile he turns on Zayn is painful and probably sharper than he means it. “Anyway, I’ll be fine, won’t I? I’ve still got Harry. Somehow.”

 

Zayn runs a hand through his hair, sweaty and unstyled from a long day in the booth, and he looks like he wants to say something else, something that'll make it better, but he's not sure what. In the end, he keeps it simple. "Yeah. Yeah, you do. Thanks for - helping.”

 

Louis gives him a little wave as he pushes away from the wall and reaches for the door handle. “ _Someone_  should learn from my mistakes.”

 

Zayn stays outside for a minute or two after Louis is gone, considering everything. When he goes back into the studio, he doesn’t nail the track on the first try, but it doesn’t take all afternoon, either. By the end of it, his vocal coach claps him on the shoulder and tells him,  _I knew you’d get it._

 

You had a rough day today, she says. It’ll be better tomorrow.

 

Zayn tells himself that it  _can_  be. He'll try to let it.

**Author's Note:**

> I give Louis a lot more damage than he probably needs? Excuse me while I write 900 pages of Larry fluff to compensate.


End file.
